Certara, a drug development consulting company, has awarded the Certara Biomedical Research Scholarship to the National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Science on behalf of postgraduate oncology research student David Morse and the research he is conducting in the laboratory of Craig Thomas.

Morse is researching the genetics of ovarian cancer in hopes of finding a way of targeting it with chemotherapy.

The American Cancer Society estimates that during 2016 about 22,280 women will receive a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer and about 14,240 women will die from the disease. Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women. A woman’s risk of getting ovarian cancer during her lifetime is about 1 in 75.

Morse’s previous research focused on the development of nanomedicines to deliver multimodal therapies to tumors. However, he discovered that the primary limitation with oncological nanomedicines is their inability to exclusively target and localize therapies to tumor sites. He believes that single-cell sequencing of cancer tumors is one of the most promising ways to advance active targeting by revealing the genomic identities of the individual tumor cells.

The Certara Biomedical Research Scholarship is administered by the International Biomedical Research Alliance in Bethesda, Maryland.